Balls and Walnuts
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The week in food
In our family, vacations are all about the food. One of our favorite vacations, an early 90s trip to New Orleans, rawked because of the food. That one of our best friends was getting married, that was just window-dressing. And our one trip to Maui (also in the early 90s) suffered for the lack of a single decent meal.
By the only metric that counts, this vacation has been a success. And without any further ado, here is our week in food.
Night one in Las Vegas: Firefly (link to our first trip there, in 2009), a tapas restaurant on Paradise (menu here). We love this place. This time around we had gazpacho, stuffed dates, baked tetilla, chorizo, and I’m not sure what else. We had a couple of drinks, too, and the bill came to around sixty. What a deal!
Night two in Las Vegas: Claim Jumper to make my parents happy. My dad has his usual: beef dip au jus. Mom and I had rotisserie chicken, Karen had a seared ahi tuna salad, and Jake had some sort of nondescript pasta dish.
Night three in Las Vegas: Buca di Beppo, a really fun family/Italian place. We had chicken parmigiano and gnocchi. About the best gnocchi I’ve ever had . . . I’m not usually a fan of gnocchi, but these were light and tasty.
Night four, our first night in the Bay Area, we went to a sushi place somewhere near San Jose. Don’t remember the name but it was fine sushi. (Seems to me the trick is finding lousy sushi in the Bay Area.)
Night five: Aziza, an uber-trendy one-Michelin-star Moroccan place in San Francisco. For appetizers, Jake had the lentil soup. Karen, Karen’s mom and I had the various spreads and the duck bisteeya. (Interesting take on bisteeya — definitely gave me a few new ideas.) Karen had the yellowtail appetizer as her entree, I had the squab, my MIL had the snapper, and Jake had the chicken with black trumpet mushrooms. Karen and I shared about the strangest cocktail ever: concord grape, elderflower, peat smoke, and laphroaig scotch. Fun desserts, too.
Tonight, we went to Amber India with Karen’s sister and her family. Lots of appetizers and velvet butter chicken and lamb tandoori and three different kinds of breads, lentils and some spicy greens. We floated away.
Tomorrow, it’s back to Bako. See ya!
D.
